As many of you are aware, Slipmat has had a fairly large growth during past few months due to our new streaming server (which is now in public use for everyone and named Frankie) and faster development cycle. Problem is, the number of active community members helping out with DJ onboarding and other support has not been growing at all.
I’m getting flooded here on Slipmat but also on other social media from people asking for private support they should be asking here on Backstage instead. This is very time consuming and causes me a fair bit of unnecessary anxiety.
We also have a growing number of frustrated new DJs because something on the site isn’t working or – more often – they did not take the time to read the instructions and don’t understand the concept of beta. I’ve tried to underline the fact that we’re still in private beta and evolving fast, and you just cannot assume that everything would work perfectly all the time. This alone would not be a problem if we would have even a couple of persons here on Backstage to explain the situation or post a link to the documentation, but as we don’t have those volunteers, this is a problem.
So, in order to avoid me burning out, we’re tightening down the invitations of new DJs to minimum until a couple of things happen:
- there are more people answering questions and generally discussing and helping out here on Backstage
- we get a better process for onboarding new DJs which involves having a named tutor who you can ask help from
until above requirements come true, only DJs who have a recommendation from an experienced Slipmat DJ are invited in. (I’ll add this requirement to the docs and explain it there.)
Obviously, everyone can create a listener profile.
How can I help?
Glad you asked! Firstly, everyone can help. No matter how much or little you know, if you know how to use Backstage, you can help.
Spend time on Backstage and on community chat
This is the most obvious thing. If you take 5 minutes away from your daily time on the toxic platforms like Facebook and connect with people here instead, you will literally make the world a better place and at the same time you’ll help our community to grow.
Answer questions
Slipmat does not have a paid staff for doing support work. We need to help each other. You don’t need to know everything, even the simplest things can help:
- search the question from Backstage
- post a simple link
- if needed, ask for more details (see how to report bugs – we need those details)
Note: if you don’t know, preface your answers with “I don’t know, but”. This is really important. Don’t spread misinformation. (Linking to old posts or asking questions is helping, that’s totally different.)
Help out new DJs
Slipmat has tons of features. Experienced DJs know how to use them even though may of them are uncodumented. Please share your knowledge!
What’s next
I’m very excited about some of the bigger upcoming features and one last big change that will help us launch the public beta. There is no timetable for this development, it’s done when it’s done. The more the community can help me and others, the faster we’ll get there. So in the end, all depends on you
I’m personally going to take a break from Backstage for a moment as I feel that burning out with random rants and questions that have been answered tens of times isn’t really smart. If the community can help me, that’s great, if not, then we’re not there yet
The next beta release should be ready in about 2-3 weeks, going to focus on that now!